Phil Parsons

Creating a zombie in Photoshop – warping the face

Ok this should have been step 1 of making our Zombie but what the heck lets get on with it. Check out part one for the tutorial images.

Step 1:

Open up your saved file from the previous tutorial and we’ll start with a little house keeping. Select all the layers other than the background layer and put them into their own group. Close the group and we’ll commence. Right, we want to now make a duplicate of our background layer and open it up in the Liquify filter by going to Filter>Liquify. Using the warp tool at the top of the tools panel with a fairly large brush move the eyebrows, nose and mouth to give her an angry look. I try to use short movements when warping in liquify to avoid over distorting things. Have a play around with it for a while until you have something familiar to below. You can hold alt down to reconstruct any over warped areas.

Step 2:

Ok so now your mask is a little messed up around the mouth and eyebrows thanks to my bad planning so you will have to go and touch those up before we can crack on. Once everything is looking good we want to start adding some gore. Where I placed my skin texture on the face I have a nice big open looking scar that I want to add some blood to. First thing to do is go into quickmask mode by hitting Q and with a fairly hard brush and paint in a selection over the scar. Hit Q out of quickmask and add a color balance adjustment layer above the skin group. You will want to adjust mainly the amount of red, magenta and yellow for the midtones, shadows and highlights until the scar looks nice and red. It will look quite bright at this stage but that’s ok and your mask may want a little tweaking too. Accept the Color balance adjustment and then change its blend mode to either multiply or color burn.

Step 3:

Add a new layer to the top and set its blend mode to multiply, select your brush tool with a fairly hard brush and a nice deep crimson bloody colour. Paint in a trickle of blood from the scar down the face and onto the chin, you may find this a little difficult with a mouse so go buy a tablet!! Add a little depth to the blood with the dodge and burn tool. Burn the outsides of the blood and hold down alt to access the dodge tool to add some inner highlights.

Step 4:

Lets add a little yellow colour to the teeth with curves and then burn them up a bit to look dirty. Select the teeth anyway you like, I used the lasso tool and feathered the selection alt + ctrl + D by 1pixel, and add a new curves adjustment layer. Adjust each channel until you have a nice yellow tone then pull the centre of the RGB line down to darken the overall look.

Now go in with the burn tool on the background copy layer we used the liquify filter on and dirty those teeth up a bit. Make another layer again positioned at the top, set its blend mode to multiply again, and select a scattered effect brush from the brushes palette. Paint some blood spray around the mouth and neck to make her look like she has just fed.

Ok we will leave this part here and maybe concentrate on changing her clothes or messing up her hair a bit next, add a comment if there is something you would like to see done to her.

Posted on October 2nd, 2008 under Photoshop tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.